Negotiations and motivation

When i decided to become a full time affiliate, I went out and spent about $2,000 on books related to business.  Some were on search engine optimization, while others covered topics like negotiation, how to get motivated, organized, etc.  One of the biggest things for me is negotiation, as I am always dealing with affiliate managers and negotiating better terms is a big deal.  I’ve read at least 6 books on negotiations, and feel a lot stronger in that department.

However no book could prepare me for the “negotiation” I had with an affiliate program just last night.  There is one affiliate program who are new to the industry, and have been e-mailing me repeatedly trying to get me to promote them.  Unfortunately, I’m extremely busy and not comfortable taking on new properties at this time, especially as most of these rooms will disappear within one year, so a lot of hard work is wasted.

So after weekly e-mails from this program and a lot of thought, I e-mailed them at midnight to tell them that unfortunately, I will not be promoting them.  I just currently don’t have the time to do so or to take on new properties, and apologized for it.  Usually when I do this, the program sucks it up, says they hope to work with me in the future, and move on.

Not these guys.

An hour later, I received an e-mail from them.  They said they knew about my reputation with building traffic for newer poker rooms, and wanted me to work with them really badly.  They would even offer incentives.  I replied back that I wasn’t interested in incentives – the fact is that I just couldn’t take them on at the moment, I didn’t have the time.  They responded:

“$5,000 plus 60% commission.”

Yikes.  Considering the industry standard starts at about 30%, that was a hell of a deal.  ESPECIALLY the $5,000 bit – I would have never expected that.  However while appealing, I still didn’t think that I could promote them as well as they expect, so I replied that it wasn’t about the money, I just still didn’t think I could bring in the traffic that they are expecting.

“$10,000 then.  You confirm, I’ll send the money right now.”

Yep – they were offering me $10,000 upfront, no strings attached just to sign up and promote them.  Now THIS is something I can work with – especially as I can take that $10k, and put $6k of it into marketing the site, and be able to start generating 5 figures a month there very quickly.   However I’m someone that doesn’t like making rash decisions – I like to think things over.  So I e-mailed back and said it was a great offer, and I had to discuss it with my employees, and I’d get back to him tomorrow.

So I wake up this morning, and what do I have sitting in my inbox?

“$15,000.  I send right now, lets do this.”

lol.  So yeah – I guess he must’ve thought I was playing hardball or something, but I’m now sitting here with $15k just for agreeing to promote an affiliate program.  Can’t say no to that!

Finally, I wanted to share a video that is very good for motivation.  These sort of videos are a bit cheesy, but if you watch them often enough I find they really work, and make you so much more motivated, and just generally a better person: